Digital Retro Park / Commons Cafe

As part of Offenbach am Main’s cultural offerings, the Digital Retro Park, Museum of Digital Culture has played an established role as a site of computing history since its opening in 2018. The museum is operated on a voluntary basis by the non-profit association Digital Retro Park e. V.

The idea for a computer museum emerged in 2010 at the HomeCon retrocomputing meeting in the Rhine-Main region; there the desire grew to preserve and convey technology, the history of devices and their influence on the present. From this impulse the "Digital Retro Park" project developed as a cooperation between the associations For Amusement Only e. V. (Seligenstadt), Erster Hanauer Netzwerkclub e. V. (Hanau) and the technology museum TECMUMAS.

Since 2011 the project has staged numerous solo exhibitions and events: an interactive tent at the Rochusmarkt in Seligenstadt, thematic installations in a bookshop, and a presentation at the Cinemaxx in Offenbach for the film release of Ralph reichts. The first larger show ran in 2013 at the Industriemuseum in Großauheim under the title "Digitale RETROkultur – Wie Computer die Haushalte eroberten" and lasted more than three months.

At the beginning of 2014 the Digital Retro Park was formally established as a non-profit association in Offenbach. From 2014 to 2019 the association maintained a workshop in the artists’ colony of the Zollamt Studios, where items were collected and work carried out together with members of Offenbach’s maker scene; start-up capital for the museum was partly raised through a campaign by the crowdfunding initiative "kulturMut" on an online platform. In 2015 the association presented the six-week exhibition "ATARI – Die guten Jahre" in the Zollamt Studios, featuring largely freely accessible exhibits and accompanying cultural evenings.

Subsequently, the Digital Retro Park continued its exhibition work at various locations, for example at the Pinball and Arcade Museum in Seligenstadt on topics such as "30 Jahre Macintosh", "Star Wars – Die Macht der Pixel" and "35 Jahre C64 / Kaffeeklatsch mit Chris Huelsbeck"; a special exhibition was also on view for several months at the Experimenta in Frankfurt am Main. The association appeared several times at trade fairs and festivals such as the developer fair Macaun in Frankfurt, the Bended Realites festivals in Offenbach, Make Rhein-Main and the Frankfurt ComicCon. In 2018 the members finally found affordable premises in the Walter-Passage on Frankfurter Straße in Offenbach, which were fitted out through their own efforts; the museum opened on 13 October 2018.